2020 MARGINS FELLOWSHIP
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
INFO: The Asian American Writers’ Workshop is now accepting applications for the 2020 Margins Fellowship. Four emerging Asian American, Muslim, and Arab writers of fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction based in New York City aged 30 and under will receive $5,000, residency time at the Millay Colony for the Arts, mentorship, access to the AAWW writing space, and publication opportunities in our online magazine, The Margins. We see this as a chance to support writers from Asian diasporic, Arab, West Asian, and North and East African communities and Muslim writers of color more broadly. If you are a writer of color who identifies with these communities, please discuss this in your application.
The Margins is an online magazine of arts and ideas featuring new fiction and poetry, literary and cultural criticism, and interviews with writers and artists. We are the recipient of a Whiting Literary Magazine award and our stories have been linked to by the Wall Street Journal, The New Inquiry, Literary Hub, and the New York Times. Our contributors include Chang-rae Lee, Jessica Hagedorn, Vijay Iyer, Bhanu Kapil, Katie Kitamura, Hua Hsu, Amitava Kumar, and Yoko Ogawa.
The Margins fellowship is open to emerging Asian American, Muslim, and Arab creative writers who are age 30 or under and reside in New York City. Fellowship applicants may not be enrolled in any academic, conservatory, college, or degree granting training program during the fellowship term. To be considered you must apply through this Submittable form. If you have additional questions, please feel free to contact us at aawwmagazine [at] gmail [dot] com.
DEADLINE: September 9, 2019
https://aaww.submittable.com/submit/144854/apply-the-margins-fellowship-2020
Walt Whitman Award
Academy of American Poets
INFO: The Walt Whitman Award is a $5,000 first-book publication prize. The winning manuscript, chosen by an acclaimed poet, is published by Graywolf Press, a leading independent publisher committed to the discovery and energetic publication of contemporary American and international literature. The winner also receives an all-expenses-paid six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in the Umbrian region of Italy, and distribution of the winning book to thousands of Academy of American Poets members.
The award was established in 1975 to encourage the work of emerging poets and to enable the publication of a poet’s first book. It is made possible by financial support from the members of the Academy of American Poets.
SUBMISSION PERIOD: September 1 – November 1, 2019
poets.org/academy-american-poets/prizes/walt-whitman-award
Blog: Language and Intersectionality Limited Series
So to Speak
INFO: The So to Speak blog is now accepting submissions for its newest limited series! We invite writers to submit craft essays that explore language and its importance in writing through an intersectional feminist lens. In an age and society where language and rhetoric are so important and influential, it is vital that we approach language as a living, breathing thing that encapsulates not only ideas, but also cultures and identities. Language should never be taken lightly and should never be co-opted. We welcome writers to submit work that explores different perspectives of why language is important to them and how language and intersectional feminism cannot exist apart from one another.
While our other limited series have centered on creative work, this limited series is only open to craft essays. What we are not looking for is creative work like poetry, fiction, and visual art. These craft essays blend personal and analysis of the very tools, like voice, tone, image, and, of course, language, we use in writing to derive meaning. Maybe it’s an essay that explores a lifelong stutter and a writer’s voice in his fiction, like in Jake Wolff’s “A Stutterer’s Guide to Writing Fiction.” Or maybe it’s an essay about linear narrative and schizophrenia, like in Elizabeth Robinson’s “Schizophrenia, Dandelions, Cookies, Floods and Scabs: Alternate Approaches.” Or maybe it’s an essay about language and intersectionality that we can’t wait to read. Whatever your perspective, submissions should blend personal narrative and analysis on language and its relationships to identity and intersectionality.
Submissions should consist of no more than 2,000 words of prose and should be double spaced with numbered pages. Please submit individual entries as LastName_Title, a brief description of the submission, and a brief artist’s bio. Simultaneous submissions are also welcomed, providing you notify us promptly if the piece has been published elsewhere.
So to Speak is humbled to share an online space with writers and artists who seek to produce thought-provoking work that engages diversity and inclusion. We can't wait to hear from you!
DEADLINE: September 10, 2019
sotospeak.submittable.com/submit/145818/blog-language-and-intersectionality-limited-series
CALL FOR PAPERS: SOLIDÃO
Feminist Press
INFO: In Virou Regra? (Is This a Rule Now? [2011]) and Mulher Negra: Afetividade e Solidão (Black women: Affectivity and loneliness [2013]), Claudete Alves and Ana Cláudia Lemos Pacheco ask: “How do race, gender and other social markers impact the affective choices of Black women?” They engage loneliness or solidão at the crux of societal demands and expectations of women of color, particularly Black women, in a global context of hypercapitalism and hypersexualization, where Black and Brown women are kept out of the “affective market” and naturalized in the “sexualized market” as domestic workers, eroticized, enslaved bodies, while white Brazilian women are assimilated into the affective culture of respectable heterosexuality. In “Enegrecendo o Feminismo / Blackening Feminism,” Sueli Carneiro (sociologist and founder of the Geledés Research Center in São Paulo) demands that the study and activism for women’s rights decenters the hegemonic idea of “mulher”/woman as white toward Africana knowledges and experiences, and the needs of Black women. Drawing from the diverse theories and experiences of Black Brazilian women, solidão describes shared isolation as an affective relational phenomenon with meanings as multiple as there are Black women. Solidão is inherent to the experiences of Black women considering the historical, social, and racial vectors that traverse our experiences. It is a concept from Black Brazilian Gender Studies that does not have a U.S. Black feminist or queer of color equivalent, nor does it translate into a single word in the English language. Yet, the feeling, and the experience, translates. As art is an expression of life, solidão resonates in creative and performing arts as well as lived experience.
How do you read/experience/address solidão? This issue invites intersectional critical theory from scholar-activists to confront systems of oppression that challenge the idea of universalism and the limited belief that humanity is white, skinny, heterosexual, able-bodied, U.S. American, middle class, Christian, and male (O que é a interseccionalidade by Carla Akotirene [2017]). How do you frame intersectional theory with Afro-Atlantic and African knowledge production outside of the United States? While recognizing the historical roots and social/racial meaning of solidão, we invite submissions that take into account how solidão is experienced differently, based on differential subjectivities and communal similarities. How can we engage solidão with Black women and LGBTQ+ communities of color as history-making and knowledge-producing protagonists?
Solidão implies an affective experience central to the formation of intersectional subjectivity. With solidão, one can reclaim José Esteban Muñoz’s theorization of the “depressive position” as central to the formation of Latinx subjectivity, specifically recalling Disidentifications and Cruising Utopia’s chapters rooted in Black queer theory and dedicated to Black queer artists (e.g., “Gesture, Ephemera, and Queer Feeling: Approaching Kevin Aviance”). We encourage authors to engage with the multilayered and multidimensional Black feminist, Black queer, queer of color theories that have yet to be translated into English, and/or that have been appropriated, misread, and/or “left alone”; to apply concepts from another language as an act of transnational solidarity with African and Afro-Atlantic women and queer of color theorizing and activism; to reengage and reclaim whitened queer of color theory written in English. We will consider work that makes productive transnational connections between Black feminist and/or queer of color affective or political theoretical productions across languages and geopolitical borders that circulated any time between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries. We invite contributions that #CiteBlackWomen outside of the United States on one or more topics (this list is not exhaustive):
Pedagogies of decentering whiteness and heteronormativity
Affect and racialized subject formation (e.g., Black queer affect)
Crip-of-color critique in relation to solidão
Black transfeminisms
Sapatões, Tortilleras, Machonas, Marimachas, Areperas, and other sexual dissidents
Genealogies of women of color theory
Affect theory and women of color
Theory-in-translation
Black women and Intimacy
The internal worlds of Black women (i.e., affective, psychic, neurological, etc.)
Loneliness as resistance and/or as pursuit of happiness (e.g., Black women’s travels)
Hypervisibility and invisibility
Black women and LGBTQ+ people of color in the workplace / Labor studies
Shared solitude and transnational solidarities
Myths and herstories of foundational Black women (Nanny, Ezili Je Wouj, Acotirene,
Dandara . . .)Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa as racialized and gendered geopolitical spaces
Intersectionality in the American hemisphere / for Americans of African and Indigenous descent
Intersectionality in performance, literature, plastic arts, music, film and/or media arts
Intersectional approaches to African and/or Afro-Atlantic diasporic religions
DEADLINE: September 15, 2019
2020-2021 CULLMAN CENTER FELLOWSHIP
INFO: The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers is an international fellowship program open to people whose work will benefit directly from access to the collections at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building—including academics, independent scholars, and creative writers (novelists, playwrights, poets). Visual artists at work on a book project are also welcome to apply.
The Center appoints 15 Fellows a year for a nine-month term at the Library, from September through May. In addition to working on their own projects, the Fellows engage in an ongoing exchange of ideas within the Center and in public forums throughout the Library.
DEADLINE: September 27, 2019
nypl.org/help/about-nypl/fellowships-institutes/center-for-scholars-and-writers
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Sinister Wisdom
INFO: Sinister Wisdom invites and welcomes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, art, and genre-bending works from all Asian Lesbians: American-born Asians, South Asians, Southeast Asians, East Asians, etc. We welcome work from Asians Lesbians in the States and all over the world written predominately in English.
If you are lesbian and Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indian, Pakistani, Bangledeshi, Sri Lankan, Nepalese, Afghan, Mongolian, Taiwanese, Korean, Hong Kongese, Macanese, Cambodian, Thai, Laotian, Singaporean, Malaysian, Pilipino, Indonesian, Burmese, Timorese, etc, please submit to us.
If your Sapphic work deals with Asian desire, fetishism, straightness camouflaging, homophobia, genocide, fasting, seclusion, negation, invisibility, confusion, arranged marriages, bisexuality, Daoism, Christianity, Taoism, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, agnosticism, atheism, negative stereotypes such as apathetic, outsourcing, “Geisha Girl,” or “perpetual foreigners”, please submit to us.
If your work is Asian, Sapphic, healthy and happy, please submit to us.
If your work is Asian, Sapphic, erotic, scholarly, secular, graphic, phantastical, haiku-ic, asexual, sassy, nuptial, eye-opening, monochromatic, please submit to us.
If your work deals with Asian Sapphic suicide, public flogging for having lesbian sex in a car, mung bean cakes, compassion, defecation and rape, nail salons, criminalized Asian lesbianism, avocado sushi rolls, dry-cleaning, cancer, impotence, astrology, lentil, naan, and chickpeas, and everything else please submit your work to us.
If you (mis) identify yourself as bamboo ceiling lesbians, not-a-model-minority due to your excessive or non-excessive lesbianism, facial whitening, please submit to us.
If you think you are not submissive or obedient, but you are Sapphic and Asian, please submit your work to us. If you think you are blissfully complacent and shy, please submit your work to us anyway.
If you work addresses Asian culture, music, food, travel, and Sapphic mail-in brides, please submit to us.
If you know someone who is Asian & lesbian, please encourage them to submit their work to us.
If you are Asian & lesbian, and your work does not deal with any of the above topics, desires, foie gras, martial arts, please submit to us regardless.
If you are Asian & lesbian, please submit poetry, visual art, comics, photographs, anime and films (screenshots only), interviews, academic anecdotes or notes, fiction, non-fiction, and genre-bending works to Sinister Wisdomthrough Submittable.
Images should .jpg or .tif files only, and be of print resolution, sized at least 300 ppi (pixels per inch).
Guest Editor: Vi Khi Nao. Born in Long Khanh, Vietnam, Vi is the author of Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018) and Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), and of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture, which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016, the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016), and the poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, which won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014 and is a finalist for a 2017 Lambda Literary Award. Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her stories, poems, and drawings have appeared in NOON, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review and BOMB, among others. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University.
DEADLINE: September 30, 2019
sinisterwisdom.submittable.com/submit
Essay Competition
Future Black Female
Are you a young woman or girl aged 16 - 22?
Are you black/African?
Who are you in the present?
Where do you live?
What do you think about the growing focus on empowering women?
Where do you see yourself 10 years from now as a black woman?
What are your hopes?
What are your dreams?
What do you desire to see in the world?
Write an essay (about 2000 words) speaking about a future where women can do anything and be anything, where you can do anything and be anything, anywhere in the world.
Be creative! (Find tips and guidelines on creative writing in our blog).
There is no right or wrong answer!
Speak to the world as if it were listening.
Speak from your head and your heart and everything in between.
What do you want the world to know about a future where you as a young black woman are empowered?
Deadline: September 30, 2019 11:59pm
PRIZES
First Prize Winner gets $1000 towards their tuition
Second Prize Winner gets $500 towards their tuition.
Third Prize Winner gets $200 towards their tuition
All essays that qualify for publication in the anthology edited by Dr. Tapo Chimbganda will also receive a $50 prize.
DEADLINE: September 30, 2019
https://www.futureblackfemale.com/rules-of-the-competition
RESIDENCY
Vermont Studio Center
INFO: Each month, VSC welcomes over 50 artists and writers from across the country around the world to our historic campus in northern Vermont.
All of our residencies include:
A private room in modest, shared housing
24-hour access to a private studio space in one of our 6 medium-specific studio buildings
3 communal meals per day (plus fresh fruit, coffee/tea/cold beverages, and cereal available around the clock)
Most residents stay with us for 1 month, so our sessions adhere to a 4-week calendar; however, residencies can be scheduled in 2-week increments ranging from 2 to 12 weeks if a shorter or longer stay better suits your needs.
DEADLINE: October 1, 2019
vermontstudiocenter.org/residencies
WRITERS & ARTIST RESIDENCY
Millay Colony for the Arts
INFO: Each year Millay Colony for the Arts invites up to 62 individuals (including writers, poets, playwrights, screenwriters and visual artists) for residencies through the colony's application process.
Residency sessions are held each month from April through November, usually lasting around 3 1/2 weeks, with 2 twelve-day sessions also available in June & September. In each discipline, decisions are made by juries of artists, critics and academics.
Your work is presented anonymously to the jury and is considered solely on the merit of your artist statement and work sample. Please keep these factors in mind as you prepare your application. It is very important that you do not include your name anywhere on your artist statement or work samples as you may be disqualified if they are within the body of work shown to the jurors. Your application will instead be assigned a number by the administration.
DEADLINE: October 1, 2019 (Midnight, EST). This deadline is for the following year of April, May, June & July residency sessions.
https://millaycolony.submittable.com/submit
9th Annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize
The Missouri Review
INFO: Submit one piece of fiction or nonfiction up to 8,500 words or any number of poems up to 10 pages. Please double-space fiction and nonfiction entries.
Multiple submissions and simultaneous submissions are welcome, but you must pay a separate fee for each entry and withdraw the piece immediately if accepted elsewhere.
Entries must be previously unpublished.
SUBMISSION FEE: $25 – $30.
AWARDS: $5,000 Fiction | $5,000 Nonfiction | $5,000 Poetry
Winners receive publication, invitation to a reception and reading in their honor, and a cash prize.
DEADLINE: October 1, 2019
missourireview.com/contests/jeffrey-e-smith-editors-prize/
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: INSURGENT TONGUES
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
INFO: In Motherless Tongues, scholar Vicente Rafael writes of the “irreducibly insurgent element in every language that undermines attempts at mastery.” “Mastery” can point to a range of things: fluency in a language, supremacy over a person, colonial suppression of a nation. A new folio of the Transpacific Literary Project will celebrate the disobedient and porous nature of language, and interrogate authoritarian attempts (and failures) to control the complex formations of self, family, school, and nation.
Because the “afterlives of empire” can be interminably long, dismantling the languages of domination requires a multi-pronged approach. In probing the insurgent nature of language and languages of (counter)insurgency, consider the following angles as possible points of departure:
1/ Distortions of colonial, hegemonic, and authoritarian languages can work to unsettle the absoluteness of power through slang and inevitable mistranslation. How might the codification of grammar and speech be liberated from/with/in your language? As precious time capsules of the now, how does slang embody shards of otherwise untold social history? And if translation and mistranslation produce infinite meaning and ambivalence across an expansive playground of language, what games go on forever?
2/ Our lexicons are multiple, susceptible to influences all around; our bodies are sites where various languages convene and commingle. Yet this linguistic multiplicity is often situated in and facilitated by unbalanced and unequal relations of power. What would an inventory of your multiply-mothered tongues and traces include? Can you draw it?
3/ In a time of rising authoritarian leadership, of Trump, Duterte, Putin, Modi, Xi Jinping, and Subianto among others, linguistic codes mix with older vernacular variations to forge fascist creolisms. How are sexism, homophobia, and transphobia sustained by rhetorical weapons from the right? Why does the fundamentalist articulation of religion persist in shaping and framing right-wing vernaculars? How do capitalist poetics of the advertising-mass-media complex fuel the language of authoritarianism? How do we engage with the poetics of white supremacy in order to refuse xenophobia and nativism?
Send us writing, translation, and art that throws light into the dark spaces of these questions.
DEADLINE: October, 7, 2019
submittable.com/submit/145748/insurgent-tongues
SHEARING FELLOWSHIP
Black Mountain Institute
INFO: The Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute, home to The Believer magazine, invites applications for residential fellowships for the 2020-21 academic year. Visiting fellows will join a community of creative writers and scholars in a thriving literary scene in Las Vegas and on the campus of UNLV, supported by individuals and groups that share our commitment to bringing writers and the literary imagination into the heart of public life.
Recent fellows include Hanif Abudrraqib, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Tayari Jones, Walter Kirn, Ahmed Naji, Claire Vaye Watkins, and many others.
For emerging and distinguished writers who have at least one book published by a trade or literary press, this fellowship includes:
a semester-long letter of appointment
a stipend of $20,000 paid over a four-month period
eligibility for health coverage
office space in the BMI offices on the campus of UNLV
free housing (fellows cover some utilities) in a unique and vibrant arts complex in the bustling district of downtown Las Vegas—home to The Writer’s Block, our city’s beloved independent bookstore.
Recognition in BMI’s literature, and on The Believer’s masthead, as a “Shearing Fellow.”
While there are no formal teaching requirements, this is a “working fellowship.” BMI's visiting fellows will maintain a regular in-office presence, around 10 hours a week, along with 10 hours of service to the community. In addition to the primary goal of furthering one’s own writing during their term in Las Vegas, visiting fellows are expected to engage in a substantial way with BMI’s community, in a way custom-scoped based on their skills and personal interest. Upon acceptance into the program, each fellow will craft a work plan in partnership with BMI’s program manager that is meaningful to all involved parties. Here are some examples of activities a visiting fellow could pursue:
Offer readings, craft talks, and other public presentations to the readers and writers of UNLV and Southern Nevada.
Curate an event or program, leveraging the fellows’ professional and creative networks.
Contribute original work to The Believer (i.e., a column or feature essay, or occasional work such as lists, or entries in “Notes & Apologies.”)
Provide editorial support to The Believer (edit essays, conduct an interview, consult on editorial conversations)
Assist with headlines, blurbs, and occasional Twitter campaigns; offer opinion on drafts and other editorial concerns that arise in the life of a literary institution.
Finalists will be asked to send copies of their books (Applicants must have at least one critically acclaimed book published by a trade press.)
Candidates will be selected by the staff and community members of BMI and The Believer.
DEADLINE: November 1, 2019